Random thoughts, musings, and tech stuff

19 Feb 2014, 20:57

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Crashlytics is awesome!

I recently started playing with Crashlytics for an app that I’m working on. I needed better crash reporting than what Google Play was giving me. I had used HockeyApp for work, and I really like that service. My initial thought was to go with HA, but as I started looking around, I noticed that Crashlytics offers a free enterprise level service. No down-side to trying it!

I gave it a shot, they do a nice job with Intellij and Gradle integration for their Android SDK, so setting up my project was quite easy. I tested it out, and again, it was very simple and worked well. The reporting that I got back was quite thorough, more than what anybody else that I’m aware of gives you. It reports not just the stack trace, but the state of the system at the time of your crash. If you’ve ever run into an Android bug, this sort of thing can really come in handy.

But, then I ran into an issue. I had some thing that was acting funny, so I pinged the Crashlytics support. I was pretty sure that it was an Android bug, but hadn’t had time to really nail down what the exact problem was. After a short back and forth, I let them know that I’d try to dig in a little more when I had time, but that I was busy and it might not be until next week. The following day, I received a long, detailed response, that included Android source code, to explain exactly the condition that I was seeing. I was floored. They had two engineers working on this, figuring out exactly what the problem was, and what to do with it. I don’t think that I could imagine a better customer service experience!

As a note, I have no affiliation with Crashlytics outside of trying out their product for a few days. Their CS rep did not ask me to write this. I was so impressed that I wanted other people to know about it.